An Appreciation of Isabel Allende

And of her four best novels

Isabel Allende has written four novels that are meaningful to me and that I regard as great.  She is my second favorite living novelist.  I’ll do my best here to share with you, in just 850 words, why I love these four novels and why I esteem Isabel Allende as of one of the world’s most gifted storytellers.

First, Allende brings history alive.  As she takes us into historical events – engrosses us, immerses us, in historical events – everything feels immediate and present.  And her stories move to the rhythms of generations; she tells the story of generations across the sweep of time.

More broadly, Allende is all about memory – about piecing together societal, family, and personal events from the past.  These memories and their meaning – these historical truths – are the most highly valued gifts in our inheritance.

Second, Allende shares with us an appreciation of cultures.  Her characters are deeply connected to culture.

And third and most importantly, Allende creates vivid, fascinating, and fully realized characters.  She is a world-class master of character development.  Her characters are so alive and of such emotional depth that they right walk out of the pages and into our minds and hearts.    

Combine the way she chisels the intimate figures of individuals with the way she weaves the tapestry of history, and each of her characters stands out from that tapestry as a finely polished gem.

These are the four Allende novels that are most meaningful to me and that I regard as great:

A family epic, A Long Petal of the Sea (2020) takes us into Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s, followed by a migration to Chile.  The characters are richly defined and beautifully portrayed, and the lead characters, Victor and Roser, are especially well-developed.    

Petal is a story of shocking and heartbreaking events — and of pain, courage, endurance, resilience, and hope.  It’s an inspiring saga of rebuilding our lives after conflict, adversity, and tragedy.

My other three favorite Allende novels form a trilogy spanning several generations and 13 decades from 1843 to 1973.  Along the way, she shows us how much we are shaped by the life experiences of our ancestors.

Daughter of Fortune (1998) is an historical adventure unfolding across four continents.  Independent spirits from all over the world arrive in California for the Gold Rush, and Allende transports us, vividly, into their time and place.

It’s a novel with a rich cast of deep, complex, well-developed characters.  It’s about finding freedom and discovering and reinventing yourself in a new world of wide-ranging opportunities and vast potential.   

The story involves the quest of the main character, Eliza, for self-understanding.  Eliza is kind, clever, real (stubborn and otherwise imperfect), well-rounded, and endearing.  She moves from being a fragile, fearful, and conventional Victorian youth to an empowered, determined, and resourceful woman.

Set from the 1860s to the 1890s, Portrait in Sepia (2000) is full of deep, colorful, and illustrious characters, including strong, powerful, intelligent, and larger-than-life women.  Amidst bloodshed and cruelty, the next generations of the family live through adventures, traumas, and heartaches. 

The main character Aurora (of mixed race) strives to dig up, remember, and piece together events from her past and the family’s past.  In doing so, she becomes healed, empowered, and whole, and with her new self-understanding she is able to define her identity and thrive in weaving together her own life as an independent woman.

Which brings us to Allende’s one indisputably great novel – a contemporary classic – which is also one of my ten favorite novels of all time: her critically acclaimed 1982 bestseller The House of the Spirits.  House is an epic of four generations in an unnamed South American country. 

House is a story of the rise and fall of a family ravaged by its own passions and the turmoil of a nation crashing down around them.  We never doubt that the nation is Chile and that the family is heavily based on Allende’s.

This brilliantly written novel brings to full fruition Allende’s imagination and discerning vision.  The story is both startling and thought-provoking.  The 1994 film with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, and Winona Ryder is worthy of the novel and just as powerful.

The family patriarch Esteban is a riveting, memorable character.  But it is Clara, the serene matriarch – who’s in touch with the supernatural and the magical and the spiritual and the psychic – who is the family’s most inspiring soul.  The narrating character Alba, raised around these strong and eccentric ancestors, comes of age as she grows in both awareness and courage.

There’s no way to ignore this novel’s connection to real-life history.  Isabel Allende’s “uncle” (second cousin) and godfather Salvador Allende was the elected President of Chile who was overthrown in a 1973 coup – which cost him his life and resulted in Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship.

The House of the Spirits is about family, the abuse of power, and forgiveness.  And it’s about the central, integral places and roles in society of awakened and empowered women. 

Ultimately, in all four novels, Allende conveys an underlying, positive spiritual reality beyond our personal and collective traumas during our lives on Earth.  She teaches us how to keep affirming life, even through the most fateful forces and devastating events.